Worst Week Ever!: July 17-22

Most journalists find it at least
somewhat amusing to see online commenters using industry terms to tell
us what we should be doing better (the best ones involve using sarcastic
quotation marks when mentioning “journalism”). But for every anonymous
suggestion that we replace a quarter-page crossword puzzle with an
investigative news story (good intention, commenter!), someone far more
sinister appropriates our terminology. Such was the case today when the
vice president of an oil and gas lobbying organization proudly stood up
for the First Amendment, at least as far as it allows his companies to
pay politicians to do what they want. The Enquirer reported that
oil and gas companies have given more than $660,000 to Ohio legislators
since 2010, more than 90 percent of which has gone to the Republicans
who this year blocked a fracking tax so reasonable that even Gov. John
Kasich supported it. Tom Stewart, executive vice president of the Ohio
Oil and Gas Association, told The Enquirer that there’s a thing
called free speech in the United States and that political giving is
free speech and that anyone who doesn’t like it can get the fuck out.

THURSDAY JULY 18

Do you care less about some of your
children than others? Feel pretty much indifferent about what happens to
all of them? Today’s online poll at Cincinnati.com’s
Mason Buzz blog sought out parents willing to drop little Billy and
Sally off at Kings Island within moments of reading a terrifying tale of
scary truck driver arrested at the amusement park with mass ammunition,
guns, knives and police hats in his truck. The community blog/coupon
adviser gathered a fascinating collection of data (797 voters can pretty
much be relied upon to represent Cincinnati as a whole), although it
offered no explanation for the 6 percent of people who were undecided,
other than to assume these parents wanted to know how long the line for
the Racer was before driving all the way up there.

FRIDAY JULY 19

Someone like Ted Nugent has to try hard
to stay in the media spotlight, mostly because his terrible music career
isn’t enough to make up for turning himself into a paranoid racist
cliché representing today’s pro-gun movement.

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Despite his irrelevance
and the fact that he’s too much of a big shot to follow all the rules of
something as simple as hunting (way to illegally bait a deer,
dumbass!), Nugent last week gave every news-gathering organization in
America a flier by going all Archie Bunker in response to the George
Zimmerman acquittal. Nugent reportedly told conspiracy theorist Alex
Jones that the only thing black people have to do to succeed is be true
to themselves by actually trying to succeed, thus resisting the lie that
black people are oppressed (by anyone other than fellow black people).
Nugent also reportedly admonished black people for the “suicidal
self-inflicted curse” they apparently inflicted upon themselves sometime
between getting off the slave ship and living freely in a country where
politicians purposely try not to help black people vote because they
don’t like them.

SATURDAY JULY 20

As if there aren’t enough human-caused
disasters and continuously mutating animals that will probably rise up
and kill us all just when we get enough money to retire and move to
Florida, Cincinnati’s eastern suburbs are being overwhelmed by an
all-natural predator, the Asian longhorned beetle. Clermont County
citizens are so tired of the beetles eating up all their trees that they
formed an organization called the Bethel ALB Citizens Cooperative,
helping draw attention to the bugs from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, which in May announced plans to remove dead trees and use
chemical treatments to kill any bugs that try to eat the good ones. The
USDA is only currently treating trees in Monroe, Stonelick and Batavia
townships, however, and has warned residents of Bethel and Tate Township
to be on the lookout for an influx of beetles with their eyes burned
out frantically flying around trying to find water.

SUNDAY JULY 21

When Gov. John Kasich makes a grand
declaration about a massive amount of free federal money potentially
coming to Ohio (or, in many cases, being sent right back to the feds),
history has proven him to be pretty legit in his prediction — he flushed
$400 million in funding for a high-speed rail line between Cincinnati,
Columbus and Cleveland before he was even in office, shortly after
telling the governor at the time that the project was dead to him.
Kasich today made a similar statement, this time arguing that Ohio will
actually get the federally funded Medicaid expansion money, despite the
Ohio legislature pretty clearly wanting to block it to make people hate
Obamacare more. Kasich, who is running for reelection next year and
would like poor people to think he helped them, says the expansion is a
matter of life and death and that once he gets the top tax bracket below
5 percent he’s going to get up in some people’s asses about Medicaid
for real.

MONDAY JULY 22

Having a baby makes people feel like
they’ve done something more important than anything anyone else could
possibly ever do (dude, my fantasy baseball team is a big deal, too).
But eventually everyone has to deal with their close friends sharing
articles from Parenting Magazine on Facebook, and today the
people of England witnessed the royal equivalent: Day 1 of Prince
William and Kate Middleton’s baby (have fun being the history books,
baby prince; you’ll never be as popular as Lil Bub while you’re alive).
Even local newspapers a million miles away from England today fired up
their “royal baby watch” sections, only to be expectedly disappointed by
an AP story that began with the same three words every other paper will
use to start the baby prince story: “It’s a boy!” (CityBeat’s
parent company advises us to spice up such bland prose with either
expletives or emoticons.) The baby, who as of press time has no name, is
currently third in line for the big chair in England, whose noble
residents reportedly celebrated by popping champagne and shouting “Hip!
Hop! Hooray!,” which most Americans thought was made up until seeing the
freaky photo of the town crier everyone’s still laughing at.